In his 2015 documentary "20 Years of Madness,” Jerry White Jr. revisits a group of old friends and fellow oddballs who came together in high school in mid-1990s Detroit to make a public-access cable TV show.

That same DIY spirit is what's driving White’s latest project, Vidlings & Tapeheads, a two-day festival showcasing short experimental films that will also include art and music. It launches Friday at the Ant Hall performance space and Ghost Light bar in Hamtramck.

“We specialize in unconventional narratives,” says White, 40. “That includes documentaries, animation and fiction. I say 'narrative' because I want there to be some kind of story but unconventional meaning. I don’t want something that people have seen a million times.”

The event's opening night on Friday will be all about music, with sets by Lt. Bad and Duane the Jet Black Eel. Competitive film screenings will take place Saturday starting at 12:30 p.m. with a Made in Michigan program. Fest prizes include software programs like Final Cut.

For Chelsey Raegen Knapp, 30, Vidlings & Tapeheads will be an opportunity for her period drama “Lemon Eyes” to screen for an audience close to her Royal Oak home. The film has already played at fests in Kalamazoo, Houston and Palm Bay, Fla., and will soon screen in Buffalo, N.Y.

She said the project began with a house — specifically, the 1898 Bernard Ginsburg house in Brush Park in Detroit that was partly designed by famed architect Albert Kahn. After that location had been secured, producer Mike Madigan asked Knapp to write a script for a film she could direct there.

'Lemon Eyes," about a woman's recollections of an abusive relationship, was directed by Chelsey Raegen Knapp and stars Jaclyn Wells.(Photo: Matthew Peach)

“Lemon Eyes,” featuring actress Jaclyn Wells, is about a woman in the 1920s whose memories of an abusive relationship are rekindled as she walks through the old house. Parts of the movie were shot at the Oakland, a bar in Ferndale.

Knapp and White use nearly the same words to explain why the film fits so cleanly into the Vidlings & Tapeheads concept. “We wanted to make something abstract and yet tell a story,” Knapp says. “We want to leave the audience thinking, questioning exactly what it is looking at.”

White sifted through about 200 submissions to find the 40 that will compete in the festival. Almost all came from the online sites FilmFreeway and Withoutabox, where independent filmmakers upload their work and connect with festival organizers around the world.

More than half of the Vidlings & Tapeheads films are directed by women. New York-based Anne Hu is behind “Cake,” which finds a married couple trying to spice up their love life with a sex robot. “As a director, writer and actor myself, I love it when filmmakers put themselves in the work,” White says. "Hu does this in the film, both in the tone of the storytelling and by playing the part of the robot.”

"Cake," directed by Anne Hu, finds a married couple trying to spice up its love life with a sex robot.(Photo: Don Downie)

White, who attended Rochester High School and the University of Southern California graduate film program, says he is one of nine programmers for the event, which includes several bands and art on display.

As a young filmmaker, White produced a similar, but much smaller, festival at Planet Ant, the tiny performance space across the street from the recently opened, 6,700-square-foot Ant Hall. He hopes to make Vidlings & Tapeheads an annual event, one that will further his long-held view that you don’t need the latest and most expensive gear to be a successful filmmaker.

“If the story is interesting and done in an unconventional way, I don’t care if you shoot on VHS or an old cell phone,” he says. “This is about people using whatever they have to make a compelling film."